Portal Services
in an OGSA-Compliant Grid
Dave Berry and Rob Allan
Portals and Portlets 2003
NeSC 16/7/03
OGSA Brainstorming
Cosener’s House, May 2003
Small meeting of people already working with GT3
Shared experiences, needs, requirements
People from a Range of UK GT3 Projects
Not all such projects represented
OGSA-DAI, MS.NETGrid, EQUATOR-MIAS, IeSE,
NEReSC Core Middleware, e-Protein, 6Net,
AstroGrid, ICENI, BioSimGrid, GridCast, NeSC
Report in Final Draft
Services available
Services required
Issues
GIS2003
NeSC, April 2003
International workshop on Grid Information
Services
Shared experiences, needs, requirements
People from a Range of UK and US eScience Projects
Not all such projects represented (e.g. HotPage
not represented)
Globus, EDG, Indiana, Oxford, Cardiff, IBM
Report in Final Draft
Comparison of methodology
Streamed vs. static information
Services required
Portals2003
This workshop!
Attempt to extend the list of required services
and categorise
Can we share OGSA services?
Can we use Portlets in the presentation layer?
Can we share Portlets?
But, Portals are just part of
the story!
Reality Check
A number of areas significant for a production Grid environment have
hardly been tackled. Areas include:
Grid information systems, service registration, discovery and
definition of facilities;
Security, in particular role-based authorisation;
Portable parallel job specifications;
Meta-scheduling, resource reservation and ‘on demand’;
Linking and interacting with remote data sources;
Wide-area computational steering;
Workflow composition and optimisation;
Distributed user and application management;
Data management and replication services, QoS;
Grid programming environments, PSEs and user interfaces;
Auditing, advertising and billing in a Grid-based resource market.
Semantic and autonomic tools;
Session management, expert system and ontologies
Monitoring, personal selection and brokering
Query based on application functionality, matching to resources
and i/o format and content
UK OGSA Resources
But we are starting:
Documentation
Installation notes (OGSA-DAI)
“How to” notes (GridCast)
Training courses and workshops (eSI, OGSA-DAI)
Grid Services (cf. Gap Analysis of Fox and Walker)
Data Access and Integration (OGSA-DAI + DQP)
Workflow, Notification (WOSE, MyGrid -> NEReSC CM)
Grid economies (GridMart)
Test applications
Tools (AstroGrid)
Template for simple services
Improved build package
Delegate class
Classification of Services Required
Absolutely
Minimal Set
Ordered by
Priority (c.f.
Gap Analysis) Key Services
for all Grids
Infrastructure
Information
Grids
Portals
Compute
Grids
Ordered by Application
Minimal Set of Services
Provided by OGSI core?
Simple Registry
built from GT3 registry service, e.g. service
groups
GridFTP/Reliable File Transfer
Job Submission
Data Access
Access Control
GT3 Security
Key OGSA Services
Authorisation Services
Notification
Building on OGSI Service Groups
Workflow
Dependency management
Deployment: which version of which services
does this service require?
UDDI Registry
Or equivalent functionality
Services by Grid Type
Information/ Data Grids
Distributed Query Processing

Preferably over any data source
Data Caches and Replication, QoS
Compute Grids
Scheduling and QoS
Dynamic deployment of applications
Portals and PSEs
Session management
State management and persistence
Presentation and personalisation
Workflow
Later…
Transaction
Visualisation
Data Mining
Computational Steering
Resource Reservation
Dynamic deployment of services
etc.
Infrastructure Required
Service Deployment
Easy Deployment
Service Versioning
Service Life Cycle Management
Central Registry
Service Factories
Data Sets
User Management
Community Authorisation
Account Generation
Monitoring
Integration Tests
Logging
Accounting
c.f. Gap Analysis Document
We focussed on immediate needs
Rather than a comprehensive survey
Some possible blind spots in our report
Network services
Security
Fabric management
Moving programs to data
Programming models, debugging
Service composition/planning
Semantic Grid
…
Practical Issues
GT3
Documentation, FAQs, Tutorials, Examples
Performance

GT3, JVM, Web Server, Service Container, OS, Services Used,
Network, …?
Deployment


Core is easy to deploy
Non-core services and security are harder
Stability, Scalability and R3
Others
Inter-working of OGSI implementations

.NET support (MS.NETGrid, OGSI.NET)
JAR versioning
Agile Development Principles
(a personal note)
Solve Immediate Problems
User-driven
Always have a working system
Don’t generalise

But do seek commonalities
Fundamental research is a separate activity
Refactor, refactor, refactor
Agility constrained for middleware projects



Interfaces everywhere
Stability important
Compatibility important
Plan for change and scalability
Versioning strategy essential
Conclusions
GT3 exploratory use happening now
Next stage: multiple sites
Small fast pioneering required
Focus initially on immediate needs
Develop full list of required OGSA services
by class for presentation at GGF